Description

This plugin implements three simple REST handlers to get content from Foswiki.
For example, these can be used to easily replace a server-side INCLUDE with a
functional equivalent using an ajax call to one of these REST handlers.

This comes in handy to asynchronously load content in a tabbed interface,
loading subsequent content for a treeview, a menu widget, or tooltips.

You may also use it to just render a snippet of TopicMarkup
on the server and return a HTML preview back to the browser.

The REST handlers of this plugin have been designed to be rather generic.
So, besides some very basic parameter checking, most error handling is up
to the callback analysing the return value of the REST handler. The
main purpose is best described as being an intermediate transport device.

Compare this to other plugins that implement more specific REST handlers.
As such, they are rather tailored to one specific service and thus will be dealing with
error cases on the server side in much more detail.

The advantage of using this plugin's REST handler is that you don't have
to implement service backends using perl. Instead, you can write TopicFunctions
that contain the WikiApplication to be executed when it is called by an
appropriate ajax request. This basically is the client side equivalent of
a parametrized INCLUDE, as it is used on server side WikiApplications (see examples below).

Syntax

same as template handler, but returns a json object holding css and js zones required to properly format the template; used via foswiki.loadTemplate()

render

text

same as expand but also renders TopicMarkup converting it to HTML

tag

name, param, <named-params>*, render

this is a convenience function to expand one specific variable instead of having to build up a snippet of code that you want to expand or render; The param parameter specifies the default parameters to this tag; the named-params are additional named parameters; the render flag indicates if the result is to be expanded only or if it should be renderd into HTML; default is off, that is only expand common tags but don't interpret TopicMarkup

template

name, expand, render

this handler loads the template name and expands the macro given in expand; the render flag indicates whether the result is to be rendered in addition to common tags being interpreted